Why Are So Many Universal Life Insurance Policies Failing?

January 8, 2019 by
Jordan Smith, JD, LLM

Traditional, nonguaranteed universal life insurance (often described in the insurance industry as current assumption UL) has been subjected to rather brutal criticism over the past few years.

It most recently came into the news in a September Wall Street Journal article that blamed the product for the financial hardship being experienced late in life by many policy owners who purchased this coverage in the 1980s and 1990s.

But how much of this condemnation is truly warranted, and how much of it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how these products are designed to work when properly tended to?